City’s school cafeteria revolution gets kids tucking in

School menus offer a multitude of options: The calendar is composed of 14 days, and during this period no dishes are repeated. Source: ITAR-TASS

A bold initiative in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s Far East, has brought wholesale changes to the city’s school cafeterias, with money being invested in cheerful renovations, healthy changes to menus, and new equipment for kitchens. As a result, pupils are now returning to cafeterias in droves.

Education reform in Russia
has now even hit school cafeterias. In the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, menu
changes and renovations to school cafeterias have resulted in pupils are returning to cafeterias in droves, with many reporting that they are actually happy to eat
at school.

All 78 schools in
Khabarovsk now have cafeterias that resemble cakes made by a skillful hostess –
but this only a recent development. Five years ago, the city began a revolution
in school nourishment – first changes were made to the local budget, then Khabarovsk
became a participant in an experiment ran by a corresponding national project.

Today, the city’s school
kitchens have the latest equipment, and the cafeterias have become quite elegant,
with peach tones and blue accents.

“And the children who
previously wouldn’t even poke their heads into the cafeteria, because they
thought the food was ‘cold and tasteless’, are starting to eat in the cafeteria
just to sit in the beautiful surroundings,” said Isabella Proshina, Director of
School No. 72.

“Now our school is like a
restaurant,” said one sixth-grader.

Incidentally, the price of a
cafeteria renovation is comparable to the cost of repair for a decent
restaurant: on average, each updated dining area costs 5 million rubles (about $144,000).

Tasty and inexpensive

At 9:15 a.m.,
the bell rings in Eastern Languages School ​No. 4, signaling the end of the
first period, and the younger pupils make their orderly exit in pairs to the
cafeteria. For breakfast, they get rice milk porridge. Some wrinkle their nose,
unhappy with the porridge, and their hardly-touched plates are left on the
tables.

Three men are on duty for
the whole 45-minute period, and they all need to do is quickly remove the food
left behind and reset the tables for the next breakfast period, when the 3rd
and 4th graders come in.

The school has 28 different groups
altogether, and they must be fed on a strict schedule - they cannot possibly
fit into the cafeteria all at once. After the third period, the seniors arrive
in the cafeteria, and unlike the younger pupils, they empty their plates
completely.

Buckwheat, rice or oatmeal
cereal with milk is on the menu on Mondays. On other days, macaroni and cheese,
cottage cheese casserole, potatoes with sausage, or even stuffed cabbage leaves
are served.

Lunch time comes
immediately after the fourth period. From 12:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.,
also in three waves, kids eat lunch in the school cafeteria. At 4:00 p.m., for those pupils that are left in daycare, the
school even offers an afternoon snack.

“We even have a snack bar,”
said school Director, Irina Gorlova. “But it only opens after the fifth period,
when lunch has almost ended, so it won’t affect pupils eating their hot meals.”
The snack bar sells pizza, pies, muffins, juice, and water – but no chips and
soda.

If five years ago this
school centrally fed 61 percent of its pupils, now this figure has climbed to
96 percent. The reason being, of course, not only the beautiful tablecloths and
cute little animals on the walls, but also that the children find the food to
be really tasty.

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The prices may have
doubled, but they remain quite low. Breakfast is 40-50 rubles ($ 1.10-1.40),
and lunch is 50-80 rubles ($ 1.40-2.30), depending on the school. Freshly baked
bread rolls with cheese or sugar can be bought for ten rubles. Children from
low-income families eat free of charge, as their food is financed by the
municipal budget – these children make up about 15 percent of the total.

Of course, these are
average figures, and in many respects the choice of centralized dining in the
school depends on age: 100 percent in elementary school, 97 percent in middle
school, and 47 percent in high school.

Those who choose not to contribute money
to centralized dining, as a rule, still eat their breakfast and lunch in the
school cafeteria, but they pay with cash, and they have the ability to
self-assemble their lunch, for example, by taking a triple garnish or a couple
salads.

Fresh and diverse

School menus offer a
multitude of options: The calendar is composed of 14 days, and during this
period no dishes are repeated.

Once a week for lunch, the
school offers a fish dish, either grilled fish or meat balls. On other days, it
offers poultry or another kind of meat. The first course consists of variations
of soups and borscht.

Every day, the school
offers up to six different types of salads. Dairy products have been added to
the menu, including curd cheese or yogurt, and are offered a few times a week.
However, the children are not fond of fully cleaned boiled eggs, and so they
have switched to omelets.

On the day observed here at School No.4, pupils ate a
salad of pickled vegetables, pea soup, Beef Stroganoff with boiled beef with
rice, and stewed fruit for lunch.

Providing diverse, tasty
food that meets all health standards is easier than ever, after having created
a single plant where the cafeteria food is prepared. Although Khabarovsk
stretches a good fifty kilometers along the Amur River, the city has found an
elegant solution.

“We have opened a chain of
14 school cafeterias. Fully-cooked and semi-prepared meals are loaded into cars
and transported to the educational institutions,” explained Irina Vsevolodova,
the Head of the Department of Education Administration of Khabarovsk.

“As a result, today, 88
percent of pupils receive a hot meal at their schools, and in fact only
recently, this figure barely reached 50 percent. And for half of our schools,
breakfast and lunch covers about 90 to 100 percent of the total pupil body.
Children are willingly going to the cafeteria, and willingly eating.”